4
Mikhail Gorbachev was unpopular in Russia, and also in our family. Usually, when you tell foreigners this, they are very surprised, because Gorbachev is thought of as the person who gave Eastern Europe back its freedom and thanks to whom Germany was reunited. Of course, that is true, and Gorbachev’s personal stature will be fairly assessed by history, but within Russia and the U.S.S.R. he was not particularly liked. He differed markedly, to his advantage, from his geriatric predecessors Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, and Konstantin Chernenko; between 1982 and 1985, Soviet leaders died one after the other in what was popularly referred to as the “funeral-carriage race.” The initial warm welcome for the new leader, however, disappeared almost immediately. Just two months after coming to power, he made the disastrous mistake of initiating an anti-alcohol campaign.
To be fair, from a historical point of view the anti-alcohol campaign was absolutely the right thing to do. To this day, Gorbachev remains the only leader in the history of Russia who has dared to do anything about the monstrous drunkenness that has been destroying our people for centuries.
Since the 1970s, the U.S.S.R. had been in the grip of a protracted crisis of alcoholism. Some research suggests that almost one-third of all deaths were alcohol related. Binge drinking had become, if not a cultural norm, then entirely commonplace. Expressions like he “got coded,”[*1] “got wasted,” “suffered delirium tremens” were not seen as anything out of the ordinary or shocking. There were alcoholics in almost every family. Idols of a generation, like the singer and actor Vladimir Vysotsky, died from this illness. One of the most important Russian books of the second half of the twentieth century—and one of my favorites, which I must have read a hundred times—was Moscow to the End of the Line, an ode to alcoholism. This is why Gorbachev needed to do something.
Gorbachev’s anti-alcohol campaign failed to bring the mortality rate below the birth rate, but at least it greatly improved the situation. Mortality among men fell by 12 percent and among women by 7 percent. These figures include deaths from illness, traffic accidents, injuries at work, and alcohol-fueled murders. However, the methods the campaign employed were horrendous and infuriated tens of millions. In the best tradition of the Soviet Union, the first priority was propaganda, so scenes of alcohol consumption were cut out of everyone’s favorite films. People were required to keep their wedding receptions nonalcoholic, and the same for celebratory banquets on special occasions and birthdays. It was a triumph of hypocrisy. Throughout the land, directors threatened to dismiss their workers for serving alcohol at parties while freely drinking among themselves and laughing at their own orders. I well remember my parents and their friends chuckling as they prepared to celebrate the New Year in our military unit and talking about bringing the wine and vodka in teapots. Everybody knew perfectly well what was going on, but observed the formal requirement that there be no alcohol on the tables. Everyone was just drinking “tea.”
In wine-growing regions, vineyards were barbarically destroyed on a massive scale. Alcohol prices were raised significantly, and shops could not sell alcohol before 2:00 p.m. The thinking of the campaign’s organizers was that by reducing the physical availability of alcohol, they would oblige people to drink less. In practice, those hardest hit were the moderate drinkers. The shortages extended to wine and spirits, and it became a problem to buy a bottle of champagne to celebrate a birthday. The needs of the less discriminating imbiber, on the other hand, were met by a boom in the production of hooch. In this instance the “invisible hand of the market” proved to function even in the socialist economy of the Soviet Union. Not to mince words, but anyone who just wanted to get smashed continued to do so, only now by drinking the most appalling garbage. In Moscow to the End of the Line—written a little earlier—there is this brilliant observation: “For some reason no one in Russia knows why Pushkin died, but how to refine furniture polish—that, everyone knows.” Indeed, the techniques for converting just about any fluid into drinkable, or at least nonlethal, alcohol were universally known. In order to combat home distilling, the authorities banned the sale of yeast. But yeast is needed for baking, and in a country where it was hard to buy food and much depended on home cooking, that really mattered. Overnight Gorbachev alienated millions of housewives who should, in theory, have been his main supporters, because the point of the campaign was to stop their husbands from being drunks.
The authorities did ultimately succeed in reducing alcohol consumption. According to official statistics, per capita sales of alcoholic beverages fell by 60 percent. In reality, it was less, because the figure ignores the substitution of hooch. However, Gorbachev’s relative success in the campaign came at the cost of all support and respect. He was soon the butt of ill-humored jokes and never regained his popularity. Indeed, the very Soviet system itself, which had always gone out of its way to demonstrate complete indifference to what the population might be thinking, faltered in the face of a massive rise in dissatisfaction. Just two years later, in 1987, the anti-alcohol campaign was phased out. No one was calculating approval ratings or undertaking surveys of the regime’s popularity at that time, but I am confident that the anti-alcohol campaign, although a positive policy in terms of the bigger picture, was paradoxically one of the causes of the collapse of the U.S.S.R. This was attributable to the wholesale desacralization of the regime, which it now became customary to deride not only in dissident circles, but among broad swaths of the population.
Gorbachev’s greatest problem, which ultimately became a problem for the U.S.S.R., was his irresolution and the half-heartedness of his actions. He wanted to be a reformer but was deeply anxious about the consequences of real reform. He would herald great changes, only then to try to avert them. He partly opened the door to freedom, but when everybody tried to rush through, he jammed his foot against it and then pushed with all his weight to stop the door from opening any farther. The trouble was that what people wanted was a fully open door, not a chink they could peep through.
My mother and I would binge-watch the new broadcasts that broke through the old censorship rules and were aired thanks to Gorbachev’s glasnost. We were outraged by any hint that he, with the help of Leonid Kravchenko, his loathsome head of the Soviet State Committee for TV and Radio Broadcasting, was trying to rein in freedom of speech and clutch at the remnants of censorship. Appreciation of his having allowed freedom of speech was instantly overshadowed a hundredfold by indignation that he was not allowing it in full. I well remember the angry outbursts in our family: For heaven’s sake, fire your wretched Kravchenko. Can’t you see that’s what the whole country wants and that it will back you?
Gorbachev’s affection for his wife, which today is seen as sweet, was met with daggers drawn by a patriarchal and backward Soviet society. “He’s henpecked. Trailing along after his wife again.” That too caused a fall in his popularity. Although Raisa Maximovna, with her haughty expression in every situation, was not doing him any favors. But what was the end result? He was a loving husband and a good family man, and they lived together for their whole lives.
It is thanks to Gorbachev that many people in Europe gained genuine freedom. I am writing this chapter in Germany, where I’m recovering after the poisoning, and here it is evident. A short time ago, in November, the thirty-first anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall was celebrated. Gorbachev’s role in that historic event was immense. Berlin is full of monuments commemorating it—at the Wall Museum, Checkpoint Charlie, and the site where the last person attempting to escape was shot dead in 1989. When the wall fell, people got, if not instant freedom, then at least a clear, short path to it. They shower praise on Gorbachev and are absolutely right to do so.
He worked obsessively to achieve disarmament. It was his personal global PR campaign, and he did reduce the probability of a global nuclear war to almost zero. He introduced new political standards in attitudes to that issue. In the post-Gorbachev world, it became impossible to talk about nuclear weapons outside the context of “reduction,” and discussing even limited use of them became taboo.
He also released political prisoners, though in his trademark irresolute and half-hearted way, he dithered at great length. (In his book, Andrei Sakharov gives a good description of how Gorbachev at first tried to impose absurd conditions on him with regard to petitions for pardons and then simply disappeared, unwilling to discuss the issue further.) Moreover, these were his political prisoners, imprisoned by his KGB to defend his Communist Party. Their freedom was given not by a man like Václav Havel—a dissident, humanist, and playwright—but by someone who, according to the Politburo transcript, in a discussion about whether to allow Sakharov to emigrate dropped remarks like “This, comrades, is the face of global Zionism.”
But what did the Russians and the other peoples of the U.S.S.R. get? “Perestroika,” “acceleration,” “glasnost,” and “state accreditation” were proclaimed, a job lot of empty slogans in the Soviet campaign tradition of “We shall catch up with and overtake the West.” The slogans were ridiculed. The suggestion was that under the new approach (perestroika), in conditions where criticism was now permitted (glasnost), people and enterprises would start working faster and more efficiently (acceleration), and the quality of their work would be monitored by special impartial commissions (state accreditation). A typical anecdote of the time:
Someone buying pies is surprised by their appearance and asks the vendor, “Excuse me, but why are your pies square?”
“Perestroika.”
“Right, but why aren’t they cooked?”
“Acceleration.”
“And why has someone taken a bite out of them?”
“State accreditation.”
The tragedy for Gorbachev and subsequently for the first generation of reformers under Boris Yeltsin is that they were obliged to introduce reforms because the economy they inherited had been completely wrecked by the Communist regime, but they were accused of having wrecked it themselves. The Soviet planned economy was falling apart at the seams. There were not enough goods to go around. Ration coupons were introduced, which had to be presented in the shops to confirm you had the right to buy something that was in short supply. I remember the coupons lying on the table at home next to the money my parents had left for my foray to the shops. They were needed for soap, sugar, tea, eggs, cereals, and vegetable oil.
The only way to remedy the situation was through political and economic reform, but the population got cause and effect backward. People felt it was not the CPSU, the State Planning Committee, and the KGB that had brought the country to the point where perestroika was essential to rescue it, but the opposite. They thought the reforms destroyed the old, stable way of life and made shortages worse, brought about the need for coupons, and deepened the poverty. “Reform” became, and remains to this day, a term of abuse: We know all about your reforms. We remember the coupons and how we all became beggars! The same fate later befell the words “democracy,” “market economy,” and “capitalism.”
The truth is that Gorbachev did everything possible to land himself in that situation. A young economist, Grigory Yavlinsky, together with a group of colleagues, proposed a 500-Day Plan. This was a program of political and economic reform that seems naive when you read it today, but was at least thought through. Back in those days, when people described as economists had been indoctrinated in the “foundations of Marxism-Leninism,” no one could have come up with anything better. Gorbachev agreed to accept the plan, which was given much publicity in all the newspapers, but then he grew apprehensive and in his preferred manner proposed instead a lifeless cadaver of illusions about an economic system in which socialism, with its planning approach to running the state, would coexist with private business and the initiatives of entrepreneurs. Imagine the conscientious collective farm workers setting out at the crack of dawn to toil honorably for the state and exchanging friendly greetings with the private farmer who is working for himself. The old, bad state plan would be replaced by a new, good state plan, and socialism would be given a human face.
The criticisms made of Gorbachev—that he was indecisive, spineless, lily-livered, half-hearted, evasive—were all true. Just as it was true that he earned them all in his opposition to the radical democrats, whom I idolized at the time. The camp of those who hated Gorbachev was divided between those who did not like the reforms and those who did not like the fact that he was introducing them too slowly. The latter, to whom I belonged, hated him much more fervently: we had a goal we could see elsewhere—complete freedom of speech, capitalism, and democracy—and that made us active critics hammering away. We also deprived Gorbachev of support from the only section of society he could count on. So when, in his own good time, having missed every opportunity, he ceased to be afraid and ran for office (before that, he had been elected only by collegial bodies like congresses and supreme soviets whose subordinate status removed the risk of losing), he gained a derisory 0.51 percent of the vote.
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The older I grew, the more intolerant I became of Gorbachev, but now I view him positively, if only because he proved completely incorruptible. In that he was unique. Everyone who had power during the transition from socialism to capitalism tried to grab as big a slice of the pie as they could. The Communist leaders of the central Asian republics of the U.S.S.R. became owners of entire countries and promptly turned them into totalitarian states. Ministers scooped up whole industries for which they had responsibility. Directors of factories found ingenious ways of becoming their owners. Nimble-footed members of the Young Communist League, whose resonant voices had vowed their preparedness to give their lives for the party, now employed their influence and connections to become oligarchs.
When Gorbachev stepped down as president, he took nothing with him, though there had been colossal opportunities for him to get rich. No one would have blinked an eye if a couple of major factories had somehow been transferred to offshore companies under the guise of “joint ventures.” He could have helped himself to state property abroad. It would have been so easy to siphon party money into personal accounts. He did none of that. People can argue as much as they like that it was because he did not have the opportunity, but the fact remains that he made no attempt to do so. In my view, that was because he was a different kind of person. Not avaricious.
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When I start thinking about Gorbachev and how he has influenced my personal destiny, I immediately switch to thinking about Leo Tolstoy and my favorite book, War and Peace, where Tolstoy, with manic obsessiveness, denies the role of the individual in history. It would have changed nothing, he asserts, if there had never been a Napoleon or a military leader like Mikhail Kutuzov. It was not Napoleon who led the French to Russia. Rather, a million circumstances, details, lives, words, desires, fears, and hopes conspired so that the French were bound to find themselves in their white breeches in the Russian woodlands in winter.
If we follow that logic, the U.S.S.R., with or without Gorbachev, would have been a goner. Russia would have started unsuccessfully introducing democracy and capitalism. There would have been a reaction. The march of history. The role of the individual in history is zilch.
Despite my respect for our great classic, I beg to differ. Undoubtedly, the U.S.S.R. was historically doomed. But sagacious foreign analysts were predicting in 1985 that it would continue for another century. I believe that if it had not been for Gorbachev’s personality, that rickety building would still be standing and oppressing its residents. Cuba and North Korea are historically even more doomed. They are not countries but a kind of Frankenstein’s monster. And yet their existence continues. They have outlived their patron, the U.S.S.R., and found themselves a new one in China.
In all likelihood my U.S.S.R. could also have held out through fifteen years of low oil prices, cracking down hard on malcontents. It could have crawled forward on its belly, sprinted in short bursts, and made it to the end of the century, by which time oil money was again flowing like a river and all would have been well.
Myself, I am most grateful to Gorbachev for lopping off that branch of history for me. As a Young Pioneer, I would have been destined at the age of sixteen to join the Young Communist League. Kids a year older than me did, but I didn’t.
I would have joined it, for sure. Anything else would have been unthinkable. I lived in an army town, and as you know, my dad was an officer. What would I have done in those circumstances with no Gorbachev? I probably would have ended up in a Soviet prison for distributing The Gulag Archipelago or Doctor Zhivago. I hope I would have had the courage to act and speak out the way the Soviet dissidents did, without receiving a great deal of sympathy or support. My parents would have been ashamed to answer when friends asked, “So what is your Alexei up to nowadays?”
That version of my future is grim, but it is the only one that is not shameful. It is more likely that I would have gone into the army like my father. I would have studied and passed exams in the theory of Marxism-Leninism. I would have been in command of incompetent subordinates and carried out the orders of idiotic superiors. Discussing news of the latest promotions, I, along with everyone else, would have repeated for the millionth time the joke that a colonel’s son can rise no higher than the rank of colonel because a general has a son of his own. It’s acutely embarrassing to think what a “successful” future in the U.S.S.R. might have looked like for me. My ability to write and to learn languages would have pointed me in the direction of international journalism or even diplomacy. My life would have been a daily struggle with others like myself for the chance of an assignment in Romania or Mongolia. My working life would have been a combination of lying and hypocrisy, and if I was good at that and was, additionally, prepared to inform on friends and colleagues to the KGB, then, who knows, I might have been sent to West Germany. In my wildest dreams, I could even imagine a trip to the United States. From there I could send back reports about the crisis of capitalism and how much all the working people there envied us living in the Soviet Union. Having concocted my weekly quota of lies, I would buy jeans and a cassette recorder. (Although, probably, it would already have been a CD player. Back home in Moscow it would, of course, be impossible to get discs. They too would have to be brought back from abroad.)
I would know that when I turned up at a reunion of my classmates, I would be rewarded for all the hassles by the fact that for a moment my entrance would make everyone fall respectfully silent. Just turning up with a fur hat and wearing a leather jacket and boots made in the German Democratic Republic would instantly effect a readjustment in the pecking order of those attending. Something at which Soviet people truly excelled was establishing from the faintest clues where someone worked, approximately how much they earned, and the range of foodstuffs they would find in their monthly under-the-counter departmental goody bag.
That is why, reflecting on that nauseating possible future, I am so grateful to Gorbachev for having done away with it. Not that he meant to. He goofed, and that is precisely what I have to thank him for. Imagining that the crumbling edifice of the Soviet state could be put right by cosmetic repairs to the facade and adding a roof garden, he enthusiastically set about creating the garden, watering it copiously, and even admitting mere mortals to it. He overlooked the fact that his watering was not only helping flowers grow on the roof but also eroding walls from which all the cement had been filched when they were being built. He overlooked the fact that inviting everyone into the garden would not lead to deferential discussion with an elite, full of allusive hints and skirting around contentious matters. On the contrary, realizing that they now could speak out without getting beaten up, the denizens of the basement would climb up to the roof en masse and state bluntly that they had no water to drink and nothing to eat. The weight of their words, the reverberation of their stamping boots, and the indignation in their hearts would make everything come tumbling down.
I didn’t regret that in the slightest. After all, what had I lost? Russia, my country, was still there. I still had my language, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Moscow and Kazan and Rostov. The army was still there, and the state. Even the bureaucrats were still where they had been. Kiev, Tallinn, and Riga did not vanish into thin air. Everything was as it had been. You could go to those cities if you wanted to. What had changed was that now you had a choice, you had freedom. What remains of that freedom in Putin’s Russia today, which is trying to pretend it is the U.S.S.R., is in fact much more than there was then. You can now choose your profession, where you want to live, and your lifestyle. You no longer have to tie yourself in knots in a competition to see who can be the more two-faced in order to be allowed a trip abroad. You can just buy a ticket and go.
At this point someone almost always says, “Only nowadays you have to have enough money,” and then reminisces about the social guarantees and equality in the U.S.S.R. In reality there was nothing of the sort. The social gulf between a collective farm worker and a member of the regional Communist Party committee was no less than the gulf we have now between an oligarch and one of today’s many average workers. Housing and cars were, by an order of magnitude, less accessible then than they are today. Sure, many people received accommodation for free, but to get it they had to wait twenty years. Of course, there is a huge difference in the ceilings for luxury and wealth then and now. In the U.S.S.R. the ceiling was on the first floor of a dacha in the “writers’ village” outside Moscow. Now there is no ceiling; it has disappeared unimaginably far away, bursting through the roofs of French chalets and skyscrapers on the edge of Central Park in New York.
That, of course, is annoying. But it does not alter the indisputable fact that although the mass of the population might indeed have been moved by grim tectonics, as Tolstoy would have it, it was nevertheless Gorbachev who started patching something up, but in the end hammered a nail in the wrong way and everything fell down. On its ruins, everyone was given the chance to live a decent life without the perpetual lying and hypocrisy. If, of course, they wanted it.